Not for the first time, people are talking about a forthcoming sectarian division of Iraq. This is an increasingly good idea, and a sound policy will embrace it and its consequences.

Western societies tend to view pluralism as a good in itself, and the failure of pluralism as a failure of their own basic premises. This is false on two counts: First, social pluralism is not a good in itself, except from an efficiency standpoint, wherein competition of thought and values drives – or at least speeds up – human progress. But this isn’t a moral case per se, and it does not follow that the good derived from the coexistence of many elements will be derived from the coexistence of all elements. We should have seen by now – even though many of us have not – that some societal elements tend toward the destruction of the very structures and mores that make social pluralism (or the “open society” of Popper, as you prefer) peacefully functional. This leads us to the second count on which the traditional Western view of pluralism is false: the West itself is not a mere agora, nor a set of morally-neutral social mechanisms, but a society with its own definitive values that need defense, and will be eroded from within if and when hostile elements take their place in its forum.

The social universes of Sunni and Shi’a in Iraq are in this respect no different. When the alienation between them is so profound that the one cannot tolerate the other; and when there is a seemingly endless cycle of slaughter and murderous vengeance, it comes time to set them apart. This is not to credit either side with any especial righteousness, or justice for its cause. Nor is it to indulge in the fantasy that separation will be bloodless. To the contrary: the spasms of violence over the points of intersection between the separating communities will be horrific. We can reasonably expect Baghdad and Kirkuk to sink further into the mire of communal murder; and we can foresee the small massacres in small places across Mesopotamia as populations separate and expel. But it is to acknowledge that the alternatives are worse. To paraphrase Raymond Aron, politics is a choice not between good and evil, but between the preferable and the detestable. What is detestable is the inevitable genocide of Sunni Iraq should strife endure in a unitary state. What is detestable is an Iraq continuing to believe it has a claim on Kurdistan, and killing any Kurd that objects. What is detestable is a United States Army worn down year after year interposing itself simply to keep savage men from doing savage things to the chronically ungrateful.

Pluralism never really had a chance in the Muslim world. There is diversity, to be sure, but it is an uneasy thing, and peace within it must be maintained by the stamp of the oppressor's boot, or the political supremacy of the non-Muslim. The former repels us, and the latter is far too tenuous to ever last. Egypt’s Copts exist at the sufferance of a suspicious and occasionally violent majority: they are the remnant of a once-thriving society of Nile Christians that ended when Nasser expelled the Greeks and other non-Muslims from Alexandria and the delta. The House of Sa’ud ruthlessly represses its eastern Shi’a. Syrian Alawites maintain power through plain brutality and fear. Iraqi Christians, having endured two genocides in the past century, and a subsquent Ba’athist cultural repression, live in quiet fear of their next ruling class. Iranian Shi'a harass and murder their Baha’i and Zoroastrian fellow-countrymen. The most obviously plural society in the region, Lebanon, was long ago reduced to a fictitious polity of borders without identity.

In this light, a unitary Iraq without an autocrat is a fool’s dream.

Accepting the end of Iraq will be a hard thing for America and its Administration. Still, it can be done, and managed: the American commitment to Kurdistan should endure, and certainly an American commitment to Assyrians and Chaldeans would be just and prudent. But it is a failure of sorts nonetheless, and a direct repudiation of the thesis that so many of us held: that political liberty is its own reward, that structures create mores, that humanity is basically good, and that all peoples’ desires are fundamentally similar. This starry-eyed optimism once animated the promise of weblogs. Writ small, it was ridiculous. Writ large, it is horrendously bloody. There is a tragedy there, that those who believed so strongly in the humanity and rectitude of the Muslim world, and of Iraqis in particular, must now bear history’s opprobrium for having kicked down the barriers that kept it from rushing into precisely the opposite condition. But the greater tragedy, and the greater opprobrium, would come if they did not learn from it.